Political scientist and media critic

December 13, 2006

Silly "neo-" foreign policies

Writing on Tapped, Robert Farley points out the problem with trying to make foreign policy based on vague analogies to the views of past and manages to work in an amusing reference to a "Neo-Polkish Foreign Policy" -- the pundit equivalent of a triple axel:

Like Atrios, I wish that people would stop naming foreign policies after fantastic interpretations of what one president or another was supposed to have thought. Bill Kristol and Bob Kaganset the stage for this kind of nonsense with their 1996 article "Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy", a set of recommendations so "neo" that they bore no recognizable resemblance to the actual foreign policy of the Reagan administration. As a general rule, I'd prefer that progressives not try to emulate Kristol or Kagan. More to the point, the project of trying to derive specific recommendations from the invariably complex foreign policy of a presidential administration that operated in a completely different context will never yield good results. All that these efforts amount to is an attempt to associate the author's pet policy recommendations with the warm fuzzies supplied by the word "Truman" or "Reagan" or "Roosevelt".

All right, enough of that. Now time to get back to my magnum opus, "Fifty-Four Forty AND Fight: Towards a Neo-Polkish Foreign Policy.